Is It Time to Rethink the T-Shaped Designer?

At the recent DMI conference in London, Geoff Mulgan, once Tony Blair's ex-strategy advisor and now a leading social entrepreneur, politely explained how 'social designers' had 'entered his space'... and failed. The reasons he gave were their naivete, their lack of knowledge about the public sector and their inability to effect change. While this caused some squirming in seats, it was a refreshing moment of critical, but constructive, feedback from a real power broker.

Social design is one of the new problem areas that designers have started to explore over the past decade, as the scope of design has expanded and the old disciplinary boundaries have blurred. Other new fields include service design, systems design, organizational design and design strategy. These interventions into new and more complex problem areas are sometimes called design thinking.

Whatever we call them, they present both opportunities and risks for design's trailblazers. The opportunities include a chance to expand the design industry into new, higher value disciplines. A risk, as Mulgan suggests, is that designers over-stretch themselves and damage their long-term prospects in these emergent domains.A risk is that designers over-stretch themselves and damage their long-term prospects in these emergent domains.

T-shaped designers

The opportunities and the risks around design thinking got me pondering, in turn, about the whole idea of the T-shaped designer. First devised by the management consultants, this model of an individual's, team's or company's know-how was adapted to design and popularized by IDEO in the noughties.

In design, the T's vertical element consists of a vertical stack of deep design expertise, which is typically acquired at college and honed through years of professional practice. Some of these capabilities are general design skills such as creativity, sketching and visual sophistication. Others are specific to a particular design discipline: for example, deft handling of surface geometry (product designers), the finer points of typography (graphic designers) and mastery of the interplay between light and space (interior designers).

The emphasis of the T-shaped model however is usually placed on the generalist horizontal beam. Capabilities here include a big-picture perspective; knowledge of other related disciplines such as marketing, production and distribution; and the ability to facilitate work across organizational silos. These tend to be developed by some more senior designers 'on the job.' These lateral competencies are the ones that have enabled some pioneering designers to edge into new problem areas.

Pioneers of the design profession have hit a major stumbling block: a weak vertical stack of capabilities that are relevant to their new discipline or problem area.

Diminished vertical stack

Mulgan explained that in 'social' design, designers are one of many rival providers claiming to have the right approach. NGOs, management consultants and service user groups all compete with social designers. Here the latter group, like many other pioneers of the design profession, have hit a major stumbling block: a weak vertical stack of capabilities that are relevant to their new discipline or problem area.

The consequence of this weakness is that social designers are left to compete primarily on their generalist 'horizontal' competencies - strategic perspective, cross-silo facilitation and the ability to synthesize. But there are plenty of other clever people out there who, in these areas, are just as strong, if not stronger than most designers. After all, designers are not the only ones who can run a workshop.

Designers should also be worldly enough to recognize that they do not hold a monopoly on creativity. Let's not confuse visual creativity with more general creative problem solving that is often required in these new domains. Anyone who has worked with a successful entrepreneur, for example, will know at how many different levels they are able to solve problems.

New problems areas require new knowledge, craft skills and methods:

Knowledge
Knowledge of traditional design disciplines and industry sectors was never designers' strong suit. Ignorance of production techniques and of wider industry dynamics has long been tolerated. However, this slack approach to mastering the subject matter of a new domain can quickly lose designers credibility. As Geoff Mulgan noted, social designers, blissfully unaware of their new domain's historical background, have often proposed ideas that were tried and failed decades ago.

Craft skills
Traditionally what designers lack in knowledge, they make up for in craft skills. Whether it be sketching, modeling, detailing or rendering, designers take an inordinate amount of pride in honing key techniques over many years. Unfortunately many of these very skills have limited use in the new design domains.

Instead, new ones are required. At Plan, we have identified some of those required for design strategy that designers are mot taught at college: they include analytical thinking, the formulation of strategic frameworks and knowing when and how to use narrative structures. These new skills are not always as tangible as the traditional ones, but still take coaching, time and practice to master.

Methods
While designers are not particularly 'process driven', there is a tendency of the design pioneers to place a little too much confidence in the design (thinking) process as an all conquering magic-method to crack every problem - from a new detergent pack to climate change. I've covered this issue of designers believing their own hype before. Nevertheless, they still need to put more effort into innovating how they design when they operate in today's new contexts. Not every problem can be cracked in a brainstorm.

Without a strong vertical stack of capabilities that are relevant to their chosen problem domain, designers stop being designers - and join the legions of free-floating generalists.

So I would submit that without a strong vertical stack of capabilities that are relevant to their chosen problem domain, designers stop being designers - and join the legions of free-floating generalists.

Building the new verticals

Some exciting new opportunities have opened up for designers. But to take advantage of them, we need to do some deeper thinking on the new problems, our transferable know-how and what new capabilities we need to work on. Even the most cocksure designer would admit that there are some problems that are best left to others more able to tackle - pension reform, for example. So what are the characteristics of problems that present fair game for designers? What is it about a design background that gives designers an edge over other providers in these new fields? What new competencies does the problem area require that designers will need to build?

I don't have the answers, but these strike me as some of the right questions to be asking.

The T-shaped designer is still an illuminating model. Yet as the example of social design and design thinking shows, serious designers should think twice about playing up their horizontal skills, and instead get down to the tougher but ultimately more rewarding work of consciously defining and building the new verticals for emergent design disciplines.

Kevin is founder of Plan, a product strategy consultancy based in London that helps companies work out what to do next. As a leading product strategist, over the past 20 years he has consulted for clients including: Samsung, Ford, HP, Lenovo, Mars, Nokia, Orange, 02, P&G, Shell, Unilever and Yamaha....

23 Comments

Great article and very timely - international development and social change is indeed a "wicked problem" as another commentator noted.
As there is a growing interest in the area along with great criticism of aid (Dead Aid, The Aid Caravan, White Man's Burden) designers are seen lately as the newest panacea. So there is the danger of still missing the point and not developing a comprehensive model and system of thought to address and assess international development and social change.
What designers are good at is organising ideas into frameworks, building models, delineating the space. Design is another discipline, along with policy, economics, ethnography and ethics, that plays a part. Not one discipline alone is sufficient and what designers can contribute is the model of interactional, dynamic interplay of ideas.
As more and more technologies play a crucial part in both the dissemination of ideas and of capabilities, it becomes clear that the participation of designers is crucial (think of "21st century statecraft" to mPesa and ushahidi).
But for designers to be able to make a meaningful contribution to the field they will need to engage and educate themselves (and our students) in the dynamics and principles of economics, policy etc - and where the limits (and responsibilities) of each discipline lies. And of course, be open to the famous interaction design notion of the "other" - and finally, accumulate as much field experience as possible or reach out to people who have relevant experience.

I also find the T useful. I tell students that in the conceptual stages many different disciplines have a contribution to make: indeed, the more disciplines involved the richer the range of perspectives informing the initial ideas. However, in the development stage different people's crafts come into play--their deep expertise--whether this is shaping the way the system communicates to the user, building the software, developing the business plan, running the user tests, etc. I would not want a graphic designer building the database for my system any more than have an engineer design the screens. Both might make a stab at it but but more likely make a hash of it.
Given the increasingly cross-disciplinary environment in which designers work, it is important for student designers to identify what deep expertise they are able and wish to develop; otherwise when they graduate they will know a little about a lot but be unable to do anything useful.

Hi Kevin,
I have probably stumbled across this late in the day but think its a interesting and timely article..
I think the key comment in all of this is actually about the ability to acquire and weald knowledge in creative ways. This ability transcends disciplines and it's what actually makes us valuable. Designers need to look beyond design as an activity and understand how we acquire and utilize knowledge in what we do. Good designers never loose the ability to learn new things, acquire new skills and expertise and weald them creatively ... if you move into a new area you need to learn it first ... when your knowledge hits critical mass you can weald it creatively ... I say this from experience having moved across 4 disciplines from product to graphics, to UX and now digital advertising ( where I am know.) The key skill that has allowed me to produce effective big picture strategy across them all is the ability to learn. surely the key to good strategy is to learn the rules of engagement before you play the game, you also need to have played the game a few times before you can play it with tactics... applying design thinking to new areas in no different.

Kevin,
Taken at face value I would agree with the greater part of your article, and feel it is a timely discussion.
However, I do challenge the perception that designers largely rely on a set of honed skills through the craft of doing and making. This to me is a rather old school view.
Having spent the last several years developing and growing the ideas of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary working within higher education. What has come to the fore is the designers ability to mediate and visualise complex models using some of these 'craft based' skills whilst working across specialisms. This has been evidenced through a great many successful collaborative projects we have undertaken during this time both within industry as well as the public sector.
Key to any T shaped-ness is the ability to mediate, communicate and make known complex inter-relationships between sometimes very disparate disciplines. In my view, design is no different to nearly every other profession in that we rarely create true experts. Sometimes there is a danger to hold up other professions against design as a way of showing its intrinsic weakness. As generalists designers are perhaps adept to see patterns and have the visualising skills to bring these together.
The lack of so called sepecialisation may well be a key to unlocking the more intrenched rigid values that may be inherent in other disiplines, with our need to question everything.
I believe whole heartedly that any designers arrogant enough to believe that through 'design thinking' they can solve complex 'wicked problems' in isolation or through their own T shaped skills are doing our emerging profession a huge disservice. Their true value lies in being happy to work in the fuzzy uncertainty that wicked problems bring, and that sucess is always through true partnership.
The difficulty for our profession and its future practice is in the knowing how and when to network and bring these different skill sets together.

Although I'm not too familiar with the term, I can relate as I do see a lot of this in the web industry. The scenarios are all too similar. I have seen a lot of social designers come in with their golden "knowledge" and spotted flaws in their campaigns simply from what I have in my vertical stack. I wouldn't put myself in that professional category but I think this goes to back up the argument in how they have failed. I will continue to read on in this as like a previous commenter said, this isn't a popular topic but it is definitely an interesting one.

I found this article very interesting and somewhat challenging to agree with in full. While I believe this is an important article for designers to read and ponder, I also believe there were some flawed ideas presented which I discuss in my retort, accessible via my blog.
http://designapparatus.wordpress.com/

This is a great article if for no other reason than designers have to be prepared to 'slaughter their darlings' but frequently don't.
I've always believed that a design training is a great grounding for addressing lots of the wider problems of the world. I loved the fact that Henry Fonda's character in 'Twelve Angry Men' was a designer (OK an architect...) who effectively converts a lynching jury by getting them to think bit broader, explore options and make value judgments. Paul Priestman in a recent presentation to the LDF said he 'only employs product designers' as he believes this is the best skill-set to handle the research and strategy as well as delivery of PriestmanGoode's projects. The quality of the work and his success speaks for itself.
However, the issue comes back to the old truism that 'if you have a hammer you tend to see every problem as a nail' and this is the challenge for design if it is to move into a wider sphere of influence. As other respondents have mentioned, it's not the shape of the letter that matters, it's the stack of experience and knowledge that comprises it which is important. To apply design thinking successfully and valuably in, say, current health policy, you need a detailed understanding of many things, most of which are nothing to do with design. Health economics, social demographies, psychology of well-being etc. may all have significant input but even a design-led approach may not be sufficiently sophisticated to assimilate these into a viable solution.
So the answer may be two-fold. Firstly, it's incumbent upon designers to have a credible 'stack of experience' appropriate to the task and it's great to hear of companies and institutions taking strides to identify what these might be. At the same time though, there's a need for other disciplines to perhaps become more T/V or X-shaped themselves and recognise that a deep skill-set in social policy or digital marketing should be accompanied by wider understanding of other issues and how ultimately, they collectively affect outcomes. Teams composed of these sorts of individuals could definitely make a difference.

As someone who's sought to apply ID methods (e.g. business & customer frameworks and rigorous methods of analysis and synthesis) over the past 10 years I have also found that on the surface, other discipline practitioners don't discern between these design methods and their own approach to problem solving. Admittedly, there are many commonalities. There is a more nuanced level of knowing how to apply, adapt and evolve these methods to each situation that comes with experience and this is challenging to communicate and teach. All disciplines have good ideas. None of us has all the answers or hold all the methods. The problems are just too complex. We still need each other.
My sense is that designers will need to get much more knowledgeable about the domains they're working in as a next step in their integration with other disciplines and organizations. Perhaps this is the next wave of design specialization skills that will also enable us to be more effective in addition to avoid falling through the cracks as a generalist.

Hi Niti,
yes, as ever, Larry Keeley is beyond reproach.
My point is more that different emerging disciplines require different vertical skill stacks, and designers learn their craft by doing (over many years), not in class. Although I'm sure Larry's classes make for a great introduction to some of these.

Kevin,
Though provoking.
There's value in retaining the T, for instance, to fuel a designer's sense of self-worth, without which we mightn't feel we can change the world for better.
But a T should always be part of CLUSTER.

Great piece and good to hear some well-argued criticism of this area. I agree with Jerry in the comment above, though I think we should be looking to train designers not to be a particular letter shape, but simply to be people who can understand how to work with a team of other equally talented people from different backgrounds. Designers often excel at seeing design problems from different perspectives, but are sometimes terrible at understanding other types of social and work cultures. Our distaste for, say corporate hierarchies and suits, for example, often close our minds to those very people we need to access in order to create change.

Funny how things work - the day before you published this I had just written a piece celebrating the T-shaped designer! I still think that it's a good model, I think the problem is that designers need to be more flexible about what goes into the deep vertical and to make sure that they're actually sufficiently expert in that deep vertical before claiming expertise.
I think the problem with many social designers is that, as you say, many underestimate the depth of expertise that is possible in this field, and think that a generalist level is sufficient. Also, as you say, that they assume that the same old approach to design will work in this environment - but with sufficient understanding and experience in this area, that fallacy is usually quickly surfaced, so this again points to lack of experience/expertise.
Personally, I still like the T-Shaped Designer - I think we just need to make sure we're keeping the required components in our horizontal bar up to date with the market place, and not overestimating our competency when deciding what our long vertical bar contains.

Geoff's talk at DMI was great but I sometimes think we need to pause before designers say we are wrong because Geoff (policy experts) told us so. Can we say that all the policy strategists, NGO's etc, while being more knowledgeable on their related issues, have been particularly good a tackling the wicked problems? i suspect most humble policy experts/makers would ask for help..
The problem of disciplinarity arrogance (i.e. move aside, design will save the world) isn't unique to design, it is in all disciplines. Interdisciplinarity learning/doing is a step in the right direction but there is still a need to stop perceiving a single discipline as the centre.
Although I have discussed them myself in the past, I'm not sure how useful singular models such as t/x/y/z shaped people are. In a practical sense some designers will be better than others at working in the traditional design context and other will be better in the non-traditional. The capacity to excel in a non-traditional setting will be influenced by a number of factors such as personal motivation, additional education/skills (e.g. STEM subjects) and provided opportunities (e.g. employment, entrepreneurialism).
Designers may have made mistakes in the recent past (what discipline hasn't?) but we don't need to beat ourselves up about it.
The current dismantling/re-ordering of the social and innovation system in the UK will provide some very interesting challenges/opportunities.
Design (thinking and doing) needs to be at the front of this wave.

Hi Kevin,
I find this piece refreshing because it starts to look at what designers are missing. In Ireland a lot of work is being done to match social science and design. I feel that the role of consultants can be very limited, and some service design within the NHS appears to be unethical. Design consultants create an amazing service, prototype it with users, but never deliver on the promise.
As Ben Reason, from Live|Work said at a recent presentation http://twitter.com/innovinterface , this is new ground; and no one has the perfect formula yet.

Great article - thank you!
In addition to increased specialization, I'd encourage educators and practitioners to expend more effort toward being communicators and mediators in the design process. I think most would agree that we designers are inherently egocentric and pretentious, and unless one can step off of the soapbox once in a while and be mindful and communicative of their "outsider" status, the result will be a solution that is out-of-touch and lacking support from the stakeholders at large.

"What is it about a design background that gives designers an edge over other providers in these new fields? What new competencies does the problem area require that designers will need to build?"
Designers' real trump card is a deep understanding of the impact of design on humans. It's as much about psychology as it is manipulating pixels or surfaces. There are two channels of psychology that the great designers master: the first is communications with the client during inception and refinement stages. The second, obviously, is understanding how the product affects the people who use it. Designers are conjurers. They oscillate above and below the surface of perception.

Kevin,
I'd say you're spot on with the problems facing designers, however, I'd make the exception for the graduates of the Institute of Design, IIT Chicago, particularly Design Planning students who go through and learn all of the things you mention above - business frameworks as applied from the designer's perspective to a rigourous methods based approach to analysis and synthesis. And the basic Design Planning course, as taught by Larry Keeley of Doblin, is a core requirement for graduation, speaking as the former Director of Admissions and head of department for all student services.

Bono is a T shaped musician. Like him or not, I think he has been quite successful in keeping his specialist (vocalist, musician) core skills separate when he is doing his generalist social design work (journalism, NGO work, activist work).
The key to success is to not let one skill set interfere with the other... Drawing like singing is helpful to get you noticed, but it is one's ability to transcend their known skill set that will allow you access to the table where the issues are being discuss and framed.
I believe Tony Blair has too much to hide in order to be helpful...beyond reproach for now.

Thanks for taking on this issue. It is not a popular topic to raise, as designer enthusiasm for the social sector has been high since the corporate sector crash of 2008. Design professionals with little or no experience in the public and social sectors figure their skills are transferrable, in the T-Shaped model. What's forgotten in the T-model is that you need the requisite variety of multiple T's to make a sufficient team. A firm such as IDEO can build or recruit a deep bench in no time if they fell short on a challenge. Other firms, not so much.
Taking this issue on head-first is necessary because, while nobody likes to tamp enthusiasm for changing the world, more stuff and more ideas are not an answer. Wicked problems have no ready solution, and designers are trained for outcomes. We need systemic thinking tools to identify true root cause and leverage points for action. These points are recognized by those who live in the problem domain, not by those who visit after their corporate jobs dry up.
Its good to remember that the UK Design Council's RED project was in this "space" early, when transformation design defined the process. Their pilot projects were great learning experiences, but we should admit that more is needed than a few case studies. No other profession would hang a shingle to practice with such brief exposure to a complex domain. After all, people's lives and finances are at stake in the social sector more than in the commercial world, where being a "user" is a matter of choice.
You've started me up on this one. I teach and advise in the Strategic Foresight and Innovation MDes program at Toronto's OCAD, where we are keenly interested in this discussion. We have grad students asking about these same issues. So, I'll be going on at http://designdialogues.com about this. I hope others weigh in as well, we need to get reality before we'll get credibility.

This is a good read, I think it's time to rethink "T". but, I think we should be moving to "V" or "Y" shaped in order to better cross over with the other people we collaborate with.
essentially this is the same as detailed in the article, it's about changing the horizontal in order to have more empathy and better communication with the rest of your team, having corss over knowledge.

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